Bond, James Bond? He stopped being fun long ago. Moore's the pity

"Sorry darling but I think my coccyx has given out." Photo: Moviestore Collection/Rex Features

Pity the poor readers who are too young to remember when Bond was camp. Imagine the scene. Roger Moore is necking champagne beneath a bear skin rug with a ditzy East German blonde called Ivana Goodtime. M calls on a phone shaped like an English bulldog. “Get your skies and hurry to Dubai, Bond,” says the bitter old grammar school boy. “The businessman Hugo von Whipcord is trying to destroy the Earth using the gravitational pull of the moon.”
“I’ll be with you in a jiffy,” says Bond, slipping on his magnetic socks. “I just need to finish something off here.”
“That’s 007 for you,” says M to Miss Flexible, his sex-starved Mi5 secretary. “Always hard at it.”

Some of us are also old enough to remember when John Cleese was funny, and this week the Monty Python legend gave a damning indictment of how unamusing modern Bond has become. “I did two movies,” he explains “and then I believe that they decided that the tone they needed was that of the Bourne action movies, which are very gritty and humourless.” He’s entirely right, as the three Daniel Craig movies confirm. Whereas Roger Moore would celebrate decapitating Hugo von Whipcord with a witty pun (“No need to lose your head”), Craig would probably check into anger management. And Cleese makes a wider observation about direction of Western cinema that is worth pondering: “The big money was coming from Asia, from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, where the audiences go to watch the action sequences, and that’s why in my opinion the action sequences go on for too long, and it’s a fundamental flaw.” In a sense, James Bond is a victim of globalisation. Don’t be surprised to see him hanging around the dole office in a safari jacket complaining about his lack of transferable skills. “James Bond will return in Licence to be a Street Performer!” Or “Diamonds are for Pawning.”

Defenders of the new movies argue that Daniel Craig’s Bond has returned to the spirit of the books, as though integrity to source material is what makes great movies. But who would actually want that? What works well as a piece of 1950s pulp fiction on the page doesn’t necessarily translate onto the screen – otherwise Casino Royale would’ve featured several days of our hero getting drunk in his hotel room. Instead, the filmmakers of the 1960s wisely chose to reimagine Bond as a post-imperial piece of camp nostalgia. He could refight all the battles that we lost and win them this time, making him a thinner, wittier Rambo. The emphasis was upon sex and spectacle; PG-rated fun for all the family so that no one would miss out of all the joyous bloodletting. Oddly some critics look back on all the Plenty O’Tooles and Xenia Onatopps (real names) and are embarrassed by the campery. They shouldn’t be: these were some of Britain’s most successful foreign exports and they kept United Artists afloat long after they lost so much money on turkeys like Heaven’s Gate. For many years, Bond saw us through industrial disputes and national bankruptcies and handed Britain back a bit of its dignity.

Alas the producers decided to move in a different direction in the new millennium. Perhaps to reach out to non-English speaking audiences, but probably just because they saw the cash being raked in by things like Bourne and decided to chase that zeitgeist instead. Which is a tragedy because it doesn’t quite work. On the one hand, Bond is still too spectacular and silly to be Bourne, which has a gritty realism that feels like international politics playing out in real time. On the other hand, trying to be all Scandinavian and dark has meant that Bond is no longer zany in the manner that it once was. Put it this way: Daniel Craig’s Bond could be any other action hero out there given how much the Britishness and kitsch has been stripped away. Doubtless the next man to play the part will be American, and he’ll take on the world with a super fit body squeezed into a half thong mankini. You'd never see Roger Moore wearing one of those. Not for all the Martini in China.

But you would see Roger's Bond make love to a woman, kill her and then move onto the next sexpot with barely a flicker of the eyebrow. For while Craig's Bond is emotional, there was something sociopathic about the polish of the old one that gave him an almost erotic edge of barely suppressed violence. Maybe the more juvenile Bonds were more adult than the contemporary offering?

As he confronts Hugo von Whipcord aboard his burning satellite surrounded by his army of genetically pure cyborgs (have you noticed that all Bond villains had a surprisingly racially diverse staff? Truly they were equal opportunity Nazis), James twists his pelvis and fires a poisoned dart from his electronic jock strap. Whipcord explodes into flames: “He always was a little hot under the collar”.